Patricia Townend
Patricia Townend (or Tricia as she is known) lives in Worthing. Unfortunately for Tricia she bought her Northern Rock shares on the eve of the bank’s need for support from the Bank of England being leaked to the media. Within a week of paying £7.43 she had seen her nest egg investment collapse to a third of its value.
The shares made up a good element of her direct equity investment and since her marriage broke up 4 years ago she is on her own and struggling on what is now a very limited income. At the age of 58 she finds she is now having to live in considerably more straitened circumstances than she ever thought possible and has very little to fall back on.
What makes her especially upset and angry is that the Government, Bank of England and the FSA all handled the whole thing very badly. The news on Northern Rock broke about 3 days after she bought the shares yet under FSA rules any information that is price sensitive should have been made public immediately. In effect she bought when there was a false market in the shares which means she has been discriminated against by poor regulation. She says that ‘obviously, if I had been privy to the information, I would never have bought the shares'.
